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Monday, January 26, 2015

A helping hand with #lastingchange

On Friday three of my good blogging buddies travelled to Kenya with Comic Relief to see the lasting changes that money from Red Nose Day brings to projects there.

One of the projects they visited was Mothers2Mothers - an organisation that mentors mothers living with HIV. The women are educated about HIV and are shown how to live happy and healthy lives. This new knowledge is taken back into the community so that all families benefit from it. Thanks to money raised by Comic Relief - Mothers2Mothers are giving helping pregnant women living with HIV to access the life-saving health services they need to prevent mother-to-child transmission.

“HIV is just a condition, you can go further, you can make wonders, you can help others” Elizabeth (above)

Kenya has the fourth-largest HIV epidemic in the world. An estimated 1.6 million people are living with HIV and 1.1 million children have been orphaned after losing one or both parents to the disease.

Women often discover they are HIV positive during ante-natal care and mentoring helps them to come to terms with this, to deal with the side effects on antiretroviral drugs, to eat well and to deliver babies with the best chance of being HIV negative. Women also learn to breastfeed safely, and to avoid stigma.

Red Nose Day officially launched today and David Walliams flew out to Kenya to be there for it.